Well... I am not that much into the "fuck the environment" attitude as to endorse Orion, but I am willing to see a few zillion tons of fossil fuels being burned to build a decent space station, some decent moon colony etc.
The Apollo astronauts _were_ tough guys doing their national duty.
Besides that. JFK was buried the day Armstrong set foot on the Moon. The goal set by him was accomplished, the Russians defeated and, thus, Joe Sixpack lost interest. There seemed to be a can-do attitude, a willingness to blow stuff up and to take risks that is no more.
It's really tragic thing. Maybe we don't deserve to be a spacefaring race.
This is not a Cell based laptop. It's a PC laptop with a Cell processor inside.
The Cell is a cool add-on but it does not make this a very interesting laptop by itself.
I would love to see a pure Cell-based laptop, mostly because it would be a decent performer and an outstanding number-cruncher. The fact that it would be completely Windows-proof would be a nice bonus.
"If your goal is efficiency, reducing your CLV capacity to the point that you can only ever do expensive seaborne recovery seems like a false savings"
Just bill that to the navy's budget. It's not like a carrier picking up a spaceship out of the water is a whole lot more expensive than a carrier doing routine ops.
"x86 chips today are 99% RISC-like (the term RISC is rarely uses today, since basically no modern CPUs are "pure RISC" in design (reduced as in not even having a multiply instruction, like older SPARCs). Sure the exposed architecture is ugly x86, but that's the compiler's job to worry about"
So, half the silicon of a high-performance RISC-like CPU is used to make it look like an old and clunky CISC architecture? That's progress.
Wouldn't it be nicer to dedicate that silicon to build another core, more cache or something else?
"The Cell/Linux platform has already got video drivers that offload graphics from the PPC" ok. That's cool and a major progress.. Still, there is no access to the GPU because Sony decided there wouldn't.
BTW, can you upgrade the memory?
You do think it is a great computer. I say it could be an amazing computer if only Sony hadn't decided it would be a videogame console.
And no. I don't own a PS3. I considered one but the FUD, as you describe it, convinced it would not be the dream machine it could be.
To conduct both projects in parallel would require building a couple more launch pads as the current shuttle/Jupiter-compatible ones will have to be changed for the Ares rockets.
And that's one more thing we can thank Microsoft for.
Hadn't DOS and the PC-clones crippled with mono-processor/mono-threading DOS/Windows stack become the dominant architecture for most of the 90s, we would have rock-solid, secure, multi-processor, 64-bit RISC boxes running some flavor of Unix on our desktops by now.
The problem is Sony cripled the environment in ways that make it very hard to use a PS3 as a computer.
I still think one could build a cheap computer with a Cell processor and make a decent profit. Those über-DSPs could do a whole lot to help the relatively puny PPC cores and having such a box readily available would foster a lot of research with asymmetric multi-processors. It's really sad to see future compsci graduates who never really used anything not descending from an IBM 5150
That said, I think there is some interesting stuff coming to the x86 world. That Larrabee x86 thing Intel is readying could be very interesting in itself and even generate some more interesting spin-offs. Imagine having a couple of cores that could, in an emergency, run the same binaries but that were tuned for different applications. One out-of-order core plus 4 in-order multi-threading cores would make a very interesting desktop processor.
WinFS was and always will be a moving target. It existed for the sole reason to prevent people and businesses from considering experimenting with other OSs and non-MS technologies, since WinFS would be soooo cool, would solve all of their problems and would be available real soon now in the next release of Windows. Or, as MS put it once, in an upgrade to XP and Vista.
Of course, after more than 10 years promising it, they can't credibly promise it anymore, so, they will change its name, change its feature-set (it seems file metadata database is no longer as cool as it was in the 1990s) and continue to employ the same technique.
It can't be _that_ hard unless your userland applications are looking at the file system from way too close.
Ideally, only system utilities (and only a few of them) should care how you do store your files on the disk.
Of course, Windows has the GUI coupled deep into the OS for design reasons. Bad design results in bad maintainability. They will have to live with that at least for now.
That's because your Firefox never decided to take over your computer while you were at lunch.
Last time it happened, I couldn't unlock the screen saver.
Re:Intelfb still broke
on
Linux 2.6.26 Out
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's actually useful if you, for some reason, need to drop to a text console and do something there (like restarting a firefox that started running amok an hour ago and now has all the system resources taken). I like my console to use the exact resolution of the laptop screen so that there are no weird pixels and, as a nice plus, the screen can fit a lot more text.
Having a 900x1024 screen and a text mode that's about 480x640 pixels and 24x80 is kind of ugly.
I think that a 40 ton container could be quite irrelevant when combined with a balloon the size of a jumbo jet when winds decide they will carry it in the wrong direction.
Slashdot Mirror
Three words:
"Big Dumb Booster"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_dumb_booster
Well... I am not that much into the "fuck the environment" attitude as to endorse Orion, but I am willing to see a few zillion tons of fossil fuels being burned to build a decent space station, some decent moon colony etc.
The Apollo astronauts _were_ tough guys doing their national duty.
Besides that. JFK was buried the day Armstrong set foot on the Moon. The goal set by him was accomplished, the Russians defeated and, thus, Joe Sixpack lost interest. There seemed to be a can-do attitude, a willingness to blow stuff up and to take risks that is no more.
It's really tragic thing. Maybe we don't deserve to be a spacefaring race.
Well... You should be able to do a full R4000 core in about a million transistors. The original 4000 had 1.35 including caches.
This is not a Cell based laptop. It's a PC laptop with a Cell processor inside.
The Cell is a cool add-on but it does not make this a very interesting laptop by itself.
I would love to see a pure Cell-based laptop, mostly because it would be a decent performer and an outstanding number-cruncher. The fact that it would be completely Windows-proof would be a nice bonus.
For this comparison to work, we would need the core transistor counts.
Still, I bet one could squeeze one or two 64-bit MIPS cores inside the Core 2 instruction decoder.
It's every bit as safe as strapping yourself to a rocket that can take you to the Moon could be.
"If your goal is efficiency, reducing your CLV capacity to the point that you can only ever do expensive seaborne recovery seems like a false savings"
Just bill that to the navy's budget. It's not like a carrier picking up a spaceship out of the water is a whole lot more expensive than a carrier doing routine ops.
So, what's so wrong with the kerosene/lox choice of the Saturn V? Couldn't we build a bigger one with safer, less powerful, cheaper fuels?
Well... 10% of the die of a modern x86 is a whole lot of transistors.
How many transistors a POWER7 has compared to a Core 2 Duo?
"x86 chips today are 99% RISC-like (the term RISC is rarely uses today, since basically no modern CPUs are "pure RISC" in design (reduced as in not even having a multiply instruction, like older SPARCs). Sure the exposed architecture is ugly x86, but that's the compiler's job to worry about"
So, half the silicon of a high-performance RISC-like CPU is used to make it look like an old and clunky CISC architecture? That's progress.
Wouldn't it be nicer to dedicate that silicon to build another core, more cache or something else?
It's a good exercise of imagination to project what a current-day Amiga, Atari ST, RISC-PC or even Lisp Machine would look like.
I bet it would blow away any gaming PC.
"It avoids a lot of concurrency related problems that most programmers are not properly trained to deal with."
And... Why do you think these programmers were never properly trained? Would it be because they never saw a real multi-processing box?
"Also, for Joe Sixpack, 64-bit is pointless"
Mostly because we use Windows or Unix-like OSs. All they can to with vast address spaces is a vast program memory. What a waste of bits.
"The Cell/Linux platform has already got video drivers that offload graphics from the PPC" ok. That's cool and a major progress.. Still, there is no access to the GPU because Sony decided there wouldn't.
BTW, can you upgrade the memory?
You do think it is a great computer. I say it could be an amazing computer if only Sony hadn't decided it would be a videogame console.
And no. I don't own a PS3. I considered one but the FUD, as you describe it, convinced it would not be the dream machine it could be.
To conduct both projects in parallel would require building a couple more launch pads as the current shuttle/Jupiter-compatible ones will have to be changed for the Ares rockets.
"Aren't a lot of games and apps single-threaded?"
And that's one more thing we can thank Microsoft for.
Hadn't DOS and the PC-clones crippled with mono-processor/mono-threading DOS/Windows stack become the dominant architecture for most of the 90s, we would have rock-solid, secure, multi-processor, 64-bit RISC boxes running some flavor of Unix on our desktops by now.
Thanks Bill.
The problem is Sony cripled the environment in ways that make it very hard to use a PS3 as a computer.
I still think one could build a cheap computer with a Cell processor and make a decent profit. Those über-DSPs could do a whole lot to help the relatively puny PPC cores and having such a box readily available would foster a lot of research with asymmetric multi-processors. It's really sad to see future compsci graduates who never really used anything not descending from an IBM 5150
That said, I think there is some interesting stuff coming to the x86 world. That Larrabee x86 thing Intel is readying could be very interesting in itself and even generate some more interesting spin-offs. Imagine having a couple of cores that could, in an emergency, run the same binaries but that were tuned for different applications. One out-of-order core plus 4 in-order multi-threading cores would make a very interesting desktop processor.
Actually, they could.
WinFS was and always will be a moving target. It existed for the sole reason to prevent people and businesses from considering experimenting with other OSs and non-MS technologies, since WinFS would be soooo cool, would solve all of their problems and would be available real soon now in the next release of Windows. Or, as MS put it once, in an upgrade to XP and Vista.
Of course, after more than 10 years promising it, they can't credibly promise it anymore, so, they will change its name, change its feature-set (it seems file metadata database is no longer as cool as it was in the 1990s) and continue to employ the same technique.
It can't be _that_ hard unless your userland applications are looking at the file system from way too close.
Ideally, only system utilities (and only a few of them) should care how you do store your files on the disk.
Of course, Windows has the GUI coupled deep into the OS for design reasons. Bad design results in bad maintainability. They will have to live with that at least for now.
That's because your Firefox never decided to take over your computer while you were at lunch.
Last time it happened, I couldn't unlock the screen saver.
It's actually useful if you, for some reason, need to drop to a text console and do something there (like restarting a firefox that started running amok an hour ago and now has all the system resources taken). I like my console to use the exact resolution of the laptop screen so that there are no weird pixels and, as a nice plus, the screen can fit a lot more text.
Having a 900x1024 screen and a text mode that's about 480x640 pixels and 24x80 is kind of ugly.
Well. It has failed to displace proprietary software in some niches, but it has done so in a great many others.
Do you see many proprietary web servers? How many proprietary mid-range relational databases there are? How many proprietary Unix OSs you see?
I think that a 40 ton container could be quite irrelevant when combined with a balloon the size of a jumbo jet when winds decide they will carry it in the wrong direction.